if you recently appended something to file, and closed it then this method will not show appended data:<?php// get contents of a file into a string$filename = "/usr/local/something.txt";$handle = fopen($filename, "r");$contents = fread($handle, filesize($filename));fclose($handle);?>You should insert a call to clearstatcache() before calling filesize()I've spent two hours to find that =/

Input is an open file handle. Return value is an integer for file sizes < 4GB, floating-point otherwise.

This starts out by skipping ~1GB at a time, reads a character in, repeats. When it gets into the last GB, it halves the size whenever the read fails. The last couple of bytes are just read in.

Some people might have concerns over this function because $pos will become a floating point number after exceeding integer limits and they know of floating point's tendencies to be inaccurate. On most computers that correctly implement the IEEE floating point spec, $pos will be accurate out to around 9 *petabytes*. Unless you are working with multi-petabyte files in PHP or the code is executing on strange hardware, this function is going to be more than sufficient. Every part of this function has been carefully crafted to deal with 32-bit deficiencies.

I have a cli script running that use the filesize function on a ssh2_sftp connection. It has the >2Gb limit issue, while it does not have that issue locally. I have managed to get around this by doing a "du -sb" command through ssh2_shell.

The following function takes the ssh2_connect resource and the path as input. It may not be neat, but it solves the problem for the moment.

Here's the best way (that I've found) to get the size of a remote file. Note that HEAD requests don't get the actual body of the request, they just retrieve the headers. So making a HEAD request to a resource that is 100MB will take the same amount of time as a HEAD request to a resource that is 1KB.

some notes and modifications to previous post.
refering to RFC, when using HTTP/1.1 your request (either GET or POST or HEAD) must contain Host header string, opposite to HTTP/1.1 where Host ain't required. but there's no sure how your remote server would treat the request so you can add Host anyway (it won't be an error for HTTP/1.0).
host value _must_ be a host name (not CNAME and not IP address).

this function catches response, containing Location header and recursively sends HEAD request to host where we are moved until final response is met.
(you can experience such redirections often when downloading something from php scripts or some hash links that use apache mod_rewrite. most all of dowloading masters handle 302 redirects correctly, so this code does it too (running recursively thru 302 redirections).)

[$counter302] specify how much times your allow this function to jump if redirections are met. If initial limit (5 is default) expired -- it returns 0 (should be modified for your purposes whatever).0
ReadHeader() function is listed in previous post
(param description is placed there too).